Tracing the template: Investigating the representation of perceptual relevance

Lead Research Organisation: Birkbeck, University of London
Department Name: Psychological Sciences

Abstract

Adaptive perception requires the prioritization of relevant over irrelevant information. When we are looking for a specific book of which we only remember the color of its cover, we can limit our search to mainly that color. The mental representation of what we are looking for is called the attentional template (also target template, search template, attentional set; e.g., Folk et al., 1992). An attentional template is a flexible representation reflecting current selection preferences, as derived from continuously changing task demands and prior selection history. Even though attentional templates are essential for shaping and controlling perception and action in everyday life, surprisingly little is known about their nature. For example, when you look for your car keys, do you look for their shape, their color, or both? In case of the latter, are shape and color integrated in a single representation, or are they independently represented? Can you look for your wallet at the same time, without affecting your "key" template? Furthermore, it is often assumed that visual attention is guided by visual templates, but it is perfectly possible that non-visual types of representation (e.g., semantic codes) are also involved. Finally, the nature of the template may change fundamentally in the course of learning, as a result of selection history. The aim of this collaborative project is to answer some of these fundamental questions.

Planned Impact

This proposal features primarily basic psychological and neuroscientific research into the mental representation which drives our vision, and fundamental constraints on top-down attentional control. Primary beneficiaries are cognitive and neuroscientists with interests in perception, memory, and action in healthy as well as clinical populations. People suffering from ADHD, ADD, schizophrenia, Parkinson, or Alzheimer are known to suffer from attention-related problems, and our work will put important theoretical constraints on mapping out those deficits. Our research also has practical implications for many situations where selective visual processing is involved - from driving to airline baggage screening, from interpreting X-rays to human search for roadside bombs in lesser peaceful parts of the world, and from web browsing to marketing.

Publications

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Berggren N (2017) The spatially global control of attentional target selection in visual search in Visual Cognition

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Berggren N (2020) Out with the old: New target templates impair the guidance of visual search by preexisting task goals. in Journal of experimental psychology. General

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Berggren N (2019) The roles of relevance and expectation for the control of attention in visual search. in Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance

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Berggren N (2018) Electrophysiological correlates of active suppression and attentional selection in preview visual search. in Neuropsychologia

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Berggren N (2021) The guidance of attention by templates for rejection during visual search. in Attention, perception & psychophysics

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Berggren N (2018) Visual Working Memory Load Disrupts Template-guided Attentional Selection during Visual Search. in Journal of cognitive neuroscience

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Berggren N (2018) Visual working memory load disrupts the space-based attentional guidance of target selection in British Journal of Psychology

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Berggren N (2020) Attentional Access to Multiple Target Objects in Visual Search. in Journal of cognitive neuroscience

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Berggren N (2016) Does Contralateral Delay Activity Reflect Working Memory Storage or the Current Focus of Spatial Attention within Visual Working Memory? in Journal of cognitive neuroscience

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Berggren N (2016) The control of attentional target selection in a colour/colour conjunction task. in Attention, perception & psychophysics

 
Description This grant was funded by the ESRC as part of the ORA initiative, with partner institutions in the Netherlands and Germany. The official end date for this grant was 31 March 2018. The goal of the London-based part of this joint research project was to obtain new insights into how mental representations of task-relevant features and objects (attentional templates) control the way in which we allocate attention to target objects. In the course of this project, we developed a range of new experimental procedures and methodological techniques that were designed to allow us to obtain temporally precise measures of electrical brain activity obtained while observers are engaged in attentional selection tasks. The research conducted in this project to date was exceptionally successful, and has already in 25 published articles. Most of these articles were published in leading high-impact journals in the field, and many of our recent findings have already received substantial attention from other researchers world-wide (see publications section for a detailed list of all publications, updated in February 2019). In addition, we have also published several articles with our collaboration partners in the Netherlands. Am additional joint article with our Dutch collaborators is currently in preparation. Results have also been disseminated at national and international conferences, including the Annual Meetings of the Vision Sciences Society (VSS), of the European Society of Cognitive Psychology (ESCOP), International Meetings of the Society for Psychophysiological Resarch, the European Conference on Visual Perception (ECVP), as well as Meetings of the UK Experimental Psychology Society (EPS), and at national and international departmental seminars and workshops (including presentations in Australia, USA, Japan, the Netherlands, and Germany).
We have found new answers to some of the fundamental questions that have been debated by attention researchers for a long time. A brief summary of the main findings from our published work is now presented. One main focus of our studies is whether attentional templates always present relevant stimuli in terms of individual features, or whether attentional selection processes can also be controlled by integrated templates for whole objects. We have shown that search for targets defined by a combination of features from the same dimension (e.g., two colours) is always strictly feature based, and cannot take into account configurational information (Berggren & Eimer, 2016, JEP:HPP; Berggren & Eimer, 2016, APP). However, and importantly, the colour dimension seems to be special in this respect. In situations where targets are defined by a conjunction of two shapes, template-based attentional guidance is initially feature-based, but at a later stage, object-based attentional templates become effective (McCants, Berggren, & Eimer, 2018: JEP: HPP). A similar temporal pattern can also be observed during search for combinations of features from different dimensions (such as colour and shape). Here, attentional control processes can be object-based, albeit only after an initial feature-based phase (Berggren & Eimer, 2018; JEP:HPP)
Because attentional templates are believed to be maintained in working memory, another part of our research was to investigate the activation of working memory representation and the role of spatial attention for these processes. We demonstrated that active working memory storage is dependent on the current focus of spatial attention that was established during a previous encoding episode (Berggren & Eimer, 2016, JOCN; see also Katus & Eimer, 2016, Neuroimage). This new finding has already attracted considerable interest, with several other labs using variations of our new procedures to track the time course and spatial selectivity of working memory activation processes. In another ongoing series of studies, we investigated the interplay between spatial and feature-based attentional control processes (e.g., Berggren & Eimer, 2018, BiolPsych). Results from several new sets of experiments addressing this issue are currently being written up. In addition, we collaborated with our project partners in Amsterdam on several interrelated issues. We demonstrated that template-guided attention shifts between multiple target objects are possible, and that their time course reflects the activation states of these templates (Grubert, Fahrenfort, Olivers, & Eimer, 2016, Neuroimage). We also developed and employed a new multivariate type of EEG analyses (decoding and encoding procedures based on training procedures followed by classification of EEG data patterns) to track the template-guided selection of multiple objects in real time (Fahrenfort, Grubert, Olivers, & Eimer, 2017; Scientific Reports).
Exploitation Route This is basic cognitive neuroscience research with possible applications in the field of ergonomics.
Sectors Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software),Education
 
Description The research conducted in this project was part of an international ORA grant that was focused on basic experimental neuroscience/cognitive psychological investigations on attentional control mechanisms. However, several of the findings with potential implications for education and ergonomics, as well as in clinical and health-related settings. Our research results have been presented at numerous conferences and in more than 20 peer-reviewed academic publications. Because of their nature, our insights into the structure and time course attentional control processes and their neural basis do not have immediate and directly measurable and/or applicable societal and economic impacts. Our insights into some intriguing limitations of these control processes (for example, in terms of the time course of activating attentional templates, as demonstrated in our recent article in the Journal of Neuroscience) do however have interesting implications for general attentional management strategies in educational contexts as well as for human/computer interface designs. Our results show that attentional control settings have to be newly activated in preparation for the next task episode, even when the same settings remain constant for extended periods. The PI is currently preparing an article aimed at an audience interested in applied research where these implications for attentional control settings in applied contexts are discussed. In addition, the insights about the nature of attentional control obtained in this project also have implications for the understanding of the nature of anxiety-related disorders and the development of new intervention strategies. Voluntary adaptive attentional task settings can often be overridden in highly anxious individuals by involuntary and maladaptive attentional biases towards particular types of signals (e.g., threat-related objects). We are currently developing new tests, based on the outcomes of this grant, with the aim of identifying such maladaptive attentional strategies in individuals with high levels of state or trait anxiety, in order to identify possible top-down strategies by which these can be managed and/or overcome.
First Year Of Impact 2015
Sector Education,Healthcare
Impact Types Societal